Pages

Monday, July 12, 2010

Monday Writers Craft Online: Finding The Right Experts

For the last 3 weeks I've been looking for food scientists, HIV/AIDS experts, radiologists and half a dozen other scientific folk to contribute quotes to articles aimed at Singapore and Malaysian markets. All I can say is: hooray for the Net!

Just 10 years ago it took a lot of phoning about to find someone suitable, then more phoning to persuade people to take part. Now you can find bios online and send email.

Getting one quote from one person is easy enough. However, when writing pieces about contested subjects, it's important to get as many opinions as possible. I get a panoply of opinion by finding bios and then using Google Scholar for papers. That shows me what side of whatever issue my scientist is on.

The savings in time for researching scientific information, now that so many scientific sources are available via the internet, is amazing. You could also focus on biomedical/biological articles if you wanted to with Pubmed.